While setting up my new NUCs to use with MAAS as a development deployment tool, I got very, very frustrated with the initial experience so I thought I’d write up some key things here so that others may benefit — especially if you are using MAAS.

First hurdle — when you hit ctrl-P at the boot screen it is likely to not work. This is because you need to disable the num lock.

Second hurdle — when you go and enable the AMT features it asks for a new password, but doesn’t tell you that it needs to contain upper case, lower case, numbers AND punctuation.

Third hurdle — if you want to use it headless like me, it’s a good idea to enable the VNC server. You can do that with this script:

Also I had to add the “-v” flag to each wsman command to ignore host validation. I’m not sure if that’s unique to my setup, but the commands wouldn’t succeed without it. Once I improved my password and added the flag, the commands worked and I’m now able to use a standard VNC client to access the console. Thanks!

Um- They add KVM plug-and-play or a lot of people won’t buy at all. [I for instance want a transportable computer that i can plug into my full-size keyboard, display, and an external drive bay EASILY and CHEAPLY, or i won’t buy at all.]